Minimizing damage from fungal pathogens, such as molds, is of considerable importance to agriculture. There is a need for better methods to promptly detect outbreaks of fungal infections, to monitor the spread of fungal infections, and to track the success of counter measures such as the application of fungicides.
For example, farms and vineyards can suffer from certain types of mold—which is a type of fungus—as winds can carry mold spores for many miles. Depending on climatic conditions, losses for vineyards may range from about 15 percent to about 40 percent or more of the harvest. The loss in harvest results in lost revenue, profit, and jobs. There is a need to cost-effectively and rapidly detect damaging mold spores so that control and mitigation measures can be quickly developed and deployed to save a harvest.
Agriculture has developed various countermeasures to fungal infections of crops, including fungicides. There is interest both in detecting the presence of a fungal infection as well as monitoring the progress of anti-fungal countermeasures.
Identifying the state of a fungal spore, such as whether the spore is virulent or sterile, is important in measuring the success of fungicides. There is, however, a lack of real-time systems and techniques to identify whether or not a fungal spore is virulent or sterile. Further, existing systems and techniques involve very expensive equipment and are thus out-of-reach for many farmers and vintners. For example, techniques using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) or atomic-force microscopy (AFM) are far too time consuming and expensive. When using an optical microscope to view a transparent fungal spore such as Erysiphe Necator (aka. Powdery mildew) or Botrytis (aka. Gray mold) a user will typically apply a staining dye to enhance the outline of the spore in order to determine the shape (morphology) of the spore; preparing stained spore samples adds undesired cost and delays. Techniques involving the use of fluorescent dyes are also not amenable to automated real-time field measurements. There is a need for improved systems and techniques to quickly and cost-effectively determine the state of a fungal or mold spore.